Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, January 5, 2011

The Passages of H.M.

(Doubleday; 450 pages; 26.95)

Poet, biographer and novelist Jay Parini takes on big subjects - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, Walter Benjamin - mainly in his nonfiction, now and then in his novels. In "The Passages of H.M." he has combined his interest in writing biographies of our finest writers and his desire to make good fiction.

Herman Melville himself declared that a great novel requires a great theme, and so Parini has made a good move. What better theme than the making of the life and art of one of our greatest writers? But Parini also took a huge chance when he decided on Melville as the center of a novel, because a reader will naturally compare the novel about the writer with novels by the writer and find the former wanting.

Of course Parini can't win.

He has produced a flawed novel, but nevertheless a novel that is one of the most interesting works of fiction about a fiction writer since "The Last Station," his novel about Tolstoy. One of the new book's flaws comes in the use of dramatically inert expository material that reeks of biography. "Alexander Selkirk," as Melville knew, we learn, "was an adventurous Scot, the model for [Robinson] Crusoe, although the novelist had transported his hero to the Caribbean, a more hospitable climate than what he might found off the west coast of Chile or Peru." Or: "That Nathaniel Hawthorne lived nearby added warmth and interest to Herman's sense of the region. He called on him as often as he dared, not wishing to wear out his welcome, riding on Waldo (his horse, named after Emerson) along the broad road to Lenox, several miles away but hardly an appreciable distance."

As anyone who has written biographical or historical fiction knows all too well, such information must find itself part of the drama or else appear to be extraneous, like air pockets or unkneaded flour in cake batter.

Another difficulty I had with the novel was Parini's depiction of Melville as a repressed homosexual, a man with erotic desire rather than filial affection for fellow novelist Hawthorne and lesser attractions to a parade of delicate young boys. This tendency seems to have grown out of Parini's reading in the work of a few daring American literary critics whose arguments in favor of this particular representation of Melville are lively but mostly unsubstantiated.

Employing these critics as his guide leads Parini to construct some engaging moments and lively scenes - young seaman Melville longing below decks for a shipmate's favors, a mature and nervous Melville meeting Walt Whitman in a tavern in Manhattan and wanting to flee, a night in bed (just sleeping) with an English chum, among other moments - but these seem programmatic almost in comparison with the novel's strengths.

Which are many.

Melville's complicated relations with his own family and with his wife's ring true, as do his friendships and feuds with his literary friends. But the finest chapters grow out of his sea voyages, to England, the Holy Land, and, especially, the South Seas. In these chapters Parini creates a liveliness in his own prose and an enlivening H.M., as he designates his main character, paralleling sequences from Melville's own novels, particularly the early books, those South Sea novels that made him a best-selling writer in his time before "Moby-Dick" and "Pierre" sank his career.

At one point, relatively early in the novel, Parini has Melville spending some free time on an ocean voyage meditating on the nature of fiction, "how it so often depended upon, even hugged, reality, embracing true stories; but the author's mind was a crucible, a virtual try-pot. It rendered whatever happened into something utterly fresh and strange. At times, it echoed Truth back to itself in sharper, shapelier tones." Such moments don't happen enough in "The Passages of H.M." to make it as remarkable a book as anything produced by its subject, but they do occur often enough for any serious devotee of Melville to enjoy its many delights.

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